SDAO Tokens: What Does it Mean to Invest in the Sun

Sooo… What you will get by purchasing SDAO tokens? And how to literally “invest to the sun”? That is simple: with Solar DAO.

Invest in the Sun… How come?

Solar DAO is a closed-end, blockchain-based investment fund created to finance construction of PV solar plants around the world.

Solar DAO offers a new financial tool that allows everyone to participate in financing the construction and management of solar parks worldwide, constantly expanding their capacity. Solar DAO will be financed through the ICO for tokens that will grant access to the project’s 100% profit through dividends distribution. The preliminary ICO closes on August 31st.

Solar DAO started with this motto — invest in the Sun. It’s time to reiterate what the investors will get in return.

It is realistic in the very positive sense of the word: does not make risky assumptions about the future, and does not hope to change the world just for the sake of it. On the contrary, Solar DAO addresses a very specific, but at the same time also very consequential issue of access of the investors to the solar market.

What You Couldn’t Do Before Solar DAO

The answer is, as usual, simple: it’s hard to invest into solar energy if you are not high net worth. You don’t have enough money. You don’t have enough expertise, so you need even more money to pay for it. You need solar energy experts, lawyers, accountants, and technicians. You need to negotiate with governments, and they will not talk to you if don’t have money. Once you’ve got enough money to invest, to make governments pay attention to you, to pay for your transaction costs, you need to wait a long time until your investments will be returned. So, again, you need to be able to wait, that is, to forsake the time value of your money that you could have invested elsewhere.

So there’s a triple hierarchy. Number one, money. If you’re not rich, with the best intention you might have to make the planet cleaner, you can’t really do it with PV solar stations. Number two, expertise. If you haven’t studied solar energy, law and economics, you can’t really invest in PV solar stations, unless you pay for the services of those who have. Number three, policy support and attention. Besides the financial hierarchy and the hierarchy of expertise, there is a hierarchy of attention. The policy makers won’t talk to you if you’re not going to invest a lot. Their deal is always a big deal.

Finally, if you do have enough to invest, afford the technical services, and make others pay attention, why would you be interested in doing it? A plenty of investment opportunities are out there, so why bother with solar energy? What’s the incentive?

How Blockchain Destroys Hierarchies

The advantage of Solar DAO is that it destroys all the three hierarchies by means of blockchain. Blockchain is famous for its capacity to eliminate hierarchical relationships and replace them with distributed ones. What Solar DAO gives you is the ability to participate in financing of PV solar stations across the world, even if you have as much as $1 in your pocket. It’s just enough to make your contribution and make the environment a little cleaner.

Number one, any amount is enough. You can buy one SDAO token for just one USD, and you will have a 100% access to the full profit of the project, as well as to the voting capacity as a member of the closed-end fund.

Number two, you don’t have to be expert. You don’t even have to pay for the expert services, since the team of the project will conduct all the necessary legal and technical due diligence. By virtue of being a member of the Solar DAO community, you avoid additional transaction costs. There is no need in any third parties to verify and enforce contracts: the Ethereum smart contract technology allows making self-enforcing and self-executing deals. Your money won’t go anywhere, if some specified conditions of the contract are not met. It’s an algorithm, not a lawyer. Just hold the tokens and see how your money goes into the actual construction of PV solar plants.

Number three, you’re not alone. The more members are there in the community, the bigger the fund, the larger the scale of PV solar plants project, the more attention they will have from the national governments. One USD is not a big deal, but what about 100’000? What about 1 million? And behind those numbers are real people, just like you, not high net worth individuals or greedy investment bankers. That’s how blockchain undermines the attention hierarchy. You can ignore a millionaire, but you can’t do that with millions of people (even with thousands, in fact).

Give Me a Token and I Will Raise the Sun

OK, what about the last issue: incentives? Well, first, time value of money matters for big money. If you have $1 M, you care about where even to hold your assets, as they can lose much of their value with the simple passage of time, due to inflation or stock market fluctuations. That’s why you would do better to find a profitable investment opportunity that is not too risky and not too long-term. On the other hand, you can always sell the tokens back to the fund or wait until they increase in value and trade them on cryptocurrency exchanges.

However, if you contribute some negligible amount, its time value does not really matter for you that much. In fact, this is how peer production economics work: if everyone contributes little, it costs them almost nothing, but the result is considerable. Wikipedia is built on the same model, as are open software development projects. To follow the well-formulated argument of one of the leading scholars in this field,

Tens of thousands of individuals collaborate in five minute increments to map Mars’s craters, fulfilling tasks that would normally require full time PhDs. A quarter of a million people collaborate on creating the most important news and commentary site currently available on technology issues. Twenty-five thousand people collaborate to create a peer-reviewed publication of commentary on technology and culture. Forty thousand people collaborate to create a more efficient human-edited directory for the Web than Yahoo.

In other words, decentralized transactions enabled by blockchain create a leverage that allows lay people to contribute to big project, without sacrificing much. It’s fair to rephrase the Archimedes’ motto: give me a token, and I will raise the sun!

What You Can Do Now

There are other, more established mechanisms to ensure the return on investment. Solar DAO has a well recognized board in the field of solar energy that will interact with potential stakeholders and utilize the proven schemes to ensure long term demand for solar electricity: Feed-in-Tariffs and Power Purchase Agreements. Signed for 15 to 25 years, they provide a fixed price for the unit of energy produced over the negotiated period, and offer favourable conditions for the plant’s operation.

To wrap up, here’ what you get by purchasing the SDAO tokens:

Contribute to the development of solar photovoltaics and making the planet cleaner

Access to the profits generate by PV solar plants around the world, according to your share of SDAO tokens

Access to the voting on development decisions within the fund

Opportunity to monitor the construction process and operation of PV solar plants via a special web-application

A stable and attractive ROI in a long term perspective, ensured by FiTs and PPAs

No transaction costs, except for gas in the Ethereum transactions

Degrees of security unachievable in traditional forms of investment

Complete anonymity

Potential increases in the value of tokens

The ability to trade in tokens on crypto-exchanges, converting it back to cryptocurrencies or fiat